Sources are now confirming to us that Polish developer People Can Fly (which are developers of Bulletstorm and the upcoming Gears of War: Judgment) have been purchased by Epic Games. The news comes just hours after news of three key members of the People Can Fly team elected to depart to pursue other opportunities.

Adrian Chmielarz, Andrzej Poznanski and Michal Kosieradzki are three key players that left People Can Fly prior to the news that it had been acquired by Epic. Little is known about the impact that the departures will have in both the long term and the short term, but the three were a significant driving force inside the studio. Epic has been quoted as saying that they will be helping and working with Chmielarz again. Chmielarz was the founder of People Can Fly.

Epic apparently has always wanted to acquire People Can Fly, so the move isn’t totally unexpected, according to a source claiming to know the situation.

Micron Technology has announced plans to buy Elpida Memory, the third largest maker of memory chips in the world.

Elpida hasn't had the best of times as of late and the company even filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Micron will acquire it for $2.5 billion. The deal will see Micron splash out $754 million in cash, while the remaining funds will be aimed at covering Elpida's debt.

The move is expected to expand Micron's manufacturing capacities at a reasonable price. Elpida's factories in Hiroshima, Japan, Rexchip's factory in Taiwan and the same company's testing facility in Akita, Japan, are expected to boost Micron's manufacturing capacity by as much as 50 percent.

Note that Micron has also announced it is buying 24 percent stake in the Rexchip Electronics Corporation from the Powerchip Technology Corporation. Seeing as how Elpida already owns a 65 percent stake there, Micron should come out of the deal with 89 percent of Rexchip ownership as well.

Intel is betting big on the future of human interfaces with a $21 million investment in Tobii, a Swedish company that has been working for years on eye-tracking laptops and other devices.

The news, announced by co-founder and VP John Elvesjö comes on the heels of Tobii’s newest eye-tracking device, which was announced a week ago at CeBit. Elvesjö said that the cunning plan was always to test its technology small scale in laptops and then expand into larger markets like cars and mobile phones.

Eye-tracking is a influential feature that could grow in value. Tobii technology has already been showing how it can control Windows 8 via eye-tracking.

Tobii is unprofitable and 2010 saw a $3.5M loss. Its new eye-tracker is smaller and cheaper and draws less power than its predecessor. It can even be embedded.

Blackstone Group and Bain Capital are preparing a bid for all of Yahoo with Asian partners in a deal that could value the Internet company at about $25 billion.

The scheme includes China's Alibaba and Japan's Softbank and while it has not been finalised it will put pressure on Yahoo's lacklustre board to sell up. If the deal goes through it will value the outfit at more than $20 billion.

Alibaba wants to buying back the 40 percent stake owned by Yahoo has said that it is keeping its options open and said it has not decided whether to participate in a bid for all of Yahoo. Alibaba is , run by its founder and billionaire CEO Jack Ma, has ties with some of the world's most prominent private equity funds and a group of investors including Silver Lake which bought 5 percent of Yahoo in early November.

A bid for Yahoo at more than $20 per share would mean a deal value of about $25 billion based on 1.24 billion shares outstanding, potentially making it the largest leveraged buyout in recent years.

Auctioneers Ebay has said that it will write a cheque for $2.4 billion for GSI Commerce.

The outfit runs websites for retailers like Toys R Us and Bath & Body Works. EBay hopes the sale will help it become more of a threat to Amazon.com.

GSI is pretty big. It runs websites, packs and ships products and offers interactive marketing services to a variety of retailers. It has long-term contracts with 180 retailers, including Radio Shack, Ace Hardware and American Eagle Outfitters. EBay has been working on improving its eBay.com website by doing things such as revamping its home page, cutting upfront listing fees it charges sellers and bolstering its search engine.

The $2.4 billion total is the second-largest amount eBay has paid for another company thus far. In 2005 eBay paid $2.6 billion for Internet calling and messaging service Skype, which it has since flogged off.

As part of the acquisition, eBay plans to sell GSI's licensed sports merchandise business and 70 percent of shopping sites RueLaLa.com and ShopRunner.com. EBay hopes to complete the deal by the end of the year.

After a few false starts and stops, Deutsche Telekom has entered into a deal to sell T-Mobile USA to AT&T. The decision has been approved by Boards of Directors at both companies in a transaction that is valued at approximately $39 billion in combination of cash and stock. AT&T will assume no debt from T-Mobile USA, as the company has a strong balance sheet.

The deal provides perhaps the best combination of the companies in the fact that both companies are currently on the GSM platform and both are committed to LTE 4G deployments going forward. The combinations of networks provided significant spectrum which would be an advantage moving forward. AT&T says as a result of this plan it will be able to reach an additional 46.5 million Americans with its 4G LTE deployment meaning that it will have coverage for 95% of the US population. It is estimated that the gain in coverage from T-Mobile USA cell sites would have taken five years to build.

It is estimated that AT&T will gain an additional 33 million customers from T-Mobile USA as part of this transaction. For T-Mobile customers, the transaction will be pretty seamless as both carriers have GSM/UMTS network that is compatible which is the clear advantage in the deal. Current T-Mobile USA customers will enjoy better coverage than they have ever had before.

Western Digital and Hitachi, announced that that they have entered into an agreement where Western Digital will acquire Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. The deal is valued at approximately $4.3 billion.

Western Digital will acquire Hitachi GST for $3.5 billion in cash and 25 million WD common shares valued at $750 million, based on a WD closing stock price of $30.01 as of March 4, 2011. Hitachi will own approximately ten percent of Western Digital shares outstanding after issuance of the shares and two representatives of Hitachi will be added to the WD board of directors at the closing of the deal.

The transaction has been approved by the board of directors of each company and is expected to close during the third calendar quarter of 2011, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. Western Digital plans to fund the transaction with a combination of existing cash and total debt of approximately $2.5 billion. The resulting company will retain the Western Digital name and will also remain headquartered in Irvine, California.

John Coyne will remain chief executive officer of Western Digital, Tim Leyden chief operating officer and Wolfgang Nickl chief financial officer. Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer of Hitachi GST, will join Western Digital at the completion of the deal as president, reporting to John Coyne.

The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hellish rumour that Oracle is going to buy chip maker AMD.

Oracle's CEO, Larry Ellison, said last month that he might contemplate buying a semiconductor company, but no sane person would have suggested that AMD was the outfit he was thinking of. However Reuters, not one for spinning rumours, speculated that Larry meant AMD because he wanted a chunk of intellectual property.

Of course it would turn the industry upside down. HP and IBM would have to buy X86 chips from a rival, which is pretty nasty. Still it does mean that Intel will get a rival with a hell of a lot of dosh and power behind it.

However, AMD was quick to dismiss the rumour. "AMD is not for sale, but we are happy to listen to any proposal which is in the interest to our shareholders," AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said.

So AMD is still open to proposals and it’s worth noting that Dave Orton was equally dismissive of any AMD – ATI deal just months before AMD took over the red graphics outfit.

North Carolina developer Epic Games, best known for the Unreal franchise and Gears of War, might be again expanding with news that again that the company might buy Realtime World’s APB title. There seems a bit more to this news now, as whispers are suggesting that Realtime Creative Director Dave Jones might be headed over to Epic, as well.

The news of APB going to Epic isn’t really new. Talk from the shadows had suggested that Epic liked the title and saw potential in it, but agreed that it needed more work and development. If Epic were to purchase APB, it is unknown what they might do with the game right now of. It is possible that they could buy it and simply turn the servers back on and re-launch the title while they gear up to start re-developing the title once again.

APB could prove to be an interesting purchase by Epic as it would give the company an MMO-style shooter platform to work with and develop into something unique, and also create a new revenue subscription stream for the company. While APB would need a good amount of work and a lot of re-thinking of the business side of the title, it could prove to be a very significant play by Epic to get into this space. Epic has long-time roots in the PC gaming space and a number of resources to leverage to make APB successful.

We will have to wait and see what happens, but APB might not be at the end of the road just yet, despite the plug being pulled.

According to several reports that we have seen, apparently Second Life developer, Linden Labs, might be up for sale. Sources are suggesting that Microsoft is apparently considering the purchase of Second Life and the studio.

The rumors seem to have been fueled by an insider who is claiming that the company has been looking at offers for some time. The fire really started to blaze when a Tweet from Second Life Community claimed that Microsoft had already submitted a bid to Linden Labs and Second Life.

Of course, no one at Microsoft is commenting; and apparently Linden Labs has now put a lid on the talk as best that they can, saying that they refuse to confirm or deny whether any possible deal is in the works. Reports do suggest that the Linden Labs office has been shut down, and you can make of that what you will. While TechEye claims that the source supplying the information that they received is reputable and from an employee, you have to think that something might actually be afoot.